TV Network Declares IPTV Tool Copyright Infringing, Even Though It's Just A Tool
from the IPTV-freely dept
To a certain segment of the population, just mentioning IPTV is enough to get them frothing at the mouth and shouting “copyright infringement” at anyone who will listen. This isn’t entirely without cause, of course, as IPTV is a technology that can be used to infringe by streaming copyrighted TV shows and films. There are entire sites out there that list such infringing content, as well. But the fact remains that IPTV is a tool, not content that infringes copyright itself. As such, there are plenty of IPTV-related tools and uses out there that are perfectly legit.
Like Perfect Player, for instance. Perfect Player is an android app that allows the user to choose what IPTV playlists from 3rd party providers can be played. In other words, it’s essentially a media player for IPTV streams. Upon installation, it does not come with infringing playlists to stream. What is watched on the player is entirely the choice of the end user. Despite all of this, one unnamed major pay-TV company filed a copyright complaint against the app with Google, arguing that because end users can use Perfect Player to infringe on copyright, the app itself was infringing. Google, frustratingly, complied and has delisted the app from the Play Store.
This week, however, the software – which has in excess of a million downloads from Google Play – was removed by Google because of a copyright complaint. It was filed by a major pay-TV provider, the name of which we’ve agreed not to publish while the complaint is ongoing.
It states that the software allows users to watch channels from unauthorized sources and is therefore illegal. However, there appears to be a considerable flaw in the pay-TV company’s arguments.
In common with the developers behind various torrent clients, Perfect Player’s developer doesn’t dictate how the software is used because no control can be exercised over that. Just like Windows Media Player, uTorrent, or even VLC (which has similar capabilities), it can be used for entirely legal purposes – or not, depending on the choice of the user.
In other words, it’s a tool. Now, the entertainment industry has a long and storied history of pretending that tools that have perfectly legitimate uses are the world’s greatest devils and somehow themselves infringe copyright. This goes back to the Betamax, and likely before that. But this particular case is one that ought to have the attention of a great many software providers out there, if not hardware providers as well. As the TorrentFreak post notes, if Perfect Player is infringing, why isn’t Windows Media Player? They have the exact same capabilities. And, taken a step further, if Perfect Player is infringing because users can use it to infringe copyright, then why aren’t android phones themselves infringing?
Is that line of thought extreme and ridiculous? Of course it is, but it’s built off of the same ridiculous line of thinking as whoever complained about Perfect Player. TorrentFreak is rather charitable in positing that perhaps this TV company came across a version of Perfect Player that had already been loaded with pirate IPTV streams and is simply confused.
Giving the TV company the benefit of the doubt for a moment, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it acquired a ready-configured copy of Perfect Player from a third-party that already contained a URL for a ‘pirate’ service. That could give the impression it’s a dedicated pirate app.
That being said, downloading a copy from Google Play would’ve highlighted the important differences between a non-configured player and one set up for piracy. That’s impossible now, of course, because Google has taken Perfect Player down.
The latest at the time of this writing is that Perfect Player will be filing a DMCA counternotice, having retained a lawyer. One hopes that some simple facts about what this app is and how it operates out of the box will be all that Google needs to get it relisted quickly. And maybe, just maybe, one TV industry player will learn a lesson about firing off DMCA notices without actually knowing what its talking about.
Filed Under: copyright, google play, iptv, perfect player, streaming
Companies: google
Comments on “TV Network Declares IPTV Tool Copyright Infringing, Even Though It's Just A Tool”
And maybe, just maybe, one TV industry player will learn a lesson about firing off DMCA notices without actually knowing what its talking about.
Still Zero consequences for filing bogus complaints…
Bluestacks plus Perfect Player equals IPTV Nirvana
Since companies don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, let us make a comment highlight their mistake. PC users can use Bluestacks to emulate an android environment on their computers. They can then download apps exactly like Perfect Player and research how to do exactly what the network tv execs were afraid you were going to do anyway.
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Re: Bluestacks plus Perfect Player equals IPTV Nirvana
Who is this "Bluestacks" you clowns are always attacking?
Re: Re: Re:
BlueStacks is an American technology company that produces the BlueStacks App Player and other cloud-based cross-platform products.
On the other hand, "blue", as in "out_of_the_blue", is an ignorant motherfucker…
Re: Re: Blueballs plus ignorant motherfucker
Poor blueballs…
Re: More garbage... yay?
I mean, you could, but why spend all the effort when there’s already more than enough content out there either free or at reasonable prices that you never have to bother with any of that rubbish?
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Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
WMP cannot get the specially curated lists of stolen content — that requires PAYING to access, else people wouldn’t need this program.
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Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
There’s no need to lie to write slanted views, but Techdirt DOES, just can’t keep from it.
And in any case, when a "tool" is specifically designed to and used to commit crimes, civil society sanctions it. You criminals have been hiding behind the "legitimate uses too" shield for too long now.
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Re: Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
Looks like my inventive names hit the "filters" now, only AC works…
Re: Re: Re: Ignorant motherfucker says what?
Hey bro. Just admit you lied about leaving here forever.
Re: Re:
You’re not wrong. Guns are tools specifically designed to and used to commit murder, and civil society has sanctioned them — if, by “sanction”, you mean “give official permission or approval for” (which is one of the two definitions of the word as a verb, the other being “impose a penalty on”).
Re: Re: Re: Re:
civil society sanctions it
You mean, like when civil society condemns corporate use of copyrights?
The people have spoken!
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Not all killing is murder, though. If it were, you’d need to disarm police and the military too, which is something no gun control law has ever done deliberately and when it has happened by accident the supposedly anti-gun politicians hold emergency sessions to amend in exemptions for police and the military.
If all violence is equally bad, then a woman fighting off a rapist is just as bad as the rapist and worse than the rapist if she kills him even by accident.
Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
Correct, but any computer user with an RSS feed can do the same thing. And anything
Last time I checked, there isn’t a version Windows Media Player for Android or iOS. And I seem to remember older versions of WMP being able to play media over the internet.
So we should shut down Hollywood? A lot of companies moved there to escape the licensing fees of the Edison company would have extracted for films. Yes, Hollywood was built on people "pirating" Edison patents.
A lot of legitimate technology can be used in illegal ways. Like a baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball, or used as a weapon of murder. Are we going to ban anything that could be used illegally? If so, we’re all criminals using illegal objects, as anything can be used for illegal activity, even if just as a blunt weapon.
The real reason why the Pay-TV is DMCA-ing the app is because they see it as competition. And rather than innovate and try to improve, they chose the lazy way out and issued a (potentially-invalid) DMCA notice. Rarely are these things about artists and filmmakers not getting money (they don’t get paid anyways), but of the gatekeepers keeping their stranglehold on media so they can buy solid-gold Humvee and diamond-studded swimming pools.
Re: Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
"Correct, but any computer user with an RSS feed can do the same thing"
Exactly. WMP is just as capable of playing pirated content as any other video playing tool. The fact that you have to take one extra step with that program does not mean that you can’t also use it for the same illegal purpose.
"A lot of legitimate technology can be used in illegal ways"
EVERY technology can be used in illegal ways.
Re: Re: Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Tim
It is now. Some people may not remember that for many years it could, by default, only play formats like ASF that hardly anyone used. People downloading MP3s and videos either had to download dodgy "codec packs", or use another player like VLC.
Re: Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
Most vertebrate species have all the tools they need to kill their own species from birth. Humans are no exception.
More people are killed in the US with hands and feet than assault weapons every year, and if anything that can be used illegally must be banned, we’d have to amputate every child’s limbs at birth.
Re: Re: Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Tim
I’d like to see that study.
Re: Windows Media Player is NOT same. You are LYING, Timmy.
"WMP cannot get the specially curated lists of stolen content"
Yes, it can.
No app left unscathed
As the TorrentFreak post notes, if Perfect Player is infringing, why isn’t Windows Media Player? They have the exact same capabilities. And, taken a step further, if Perfect Player is infringing because users can use it to infringe copyright, then why aren’t android phones themselves infringing?
If ‘it can be used to violate the law, therefore it will be treated as though it had‘ is the standard they want to use, then they’d best take a digital chainsaw to their app store(including their own apps unless they want to highlight their hypocrisy) to be consistent, as I suspect a good chunk of the apps there have at least some ability to violate at least one law if used in a particular way.
Re: No app left unscathed
I’m still waiting for facebook’s app to be taken down for unlicensed porography, child porography, revenge pornography, soliciting sex, soliciting sex from minors, stalking, bullying, displaying too many cat memes, libel, slander, drug trafficking, conspiracy, conspiracy to commit murder, and inciting a riot.
Re: Re:
What, no speeding?
Re: Re: No app left unscathed
wtf does "porography" mean?
Re: Re: Re: No app left unscathed
Don’t be dense.
Re: Re: Re: No app left unscathed
Here’s an example. The word’s obviously derived from the Greek πόρος (póros meaning "passage") and γράφω (gráphō, "drawing").
When will this end?
A car can be used to aid in a bank robbery, ergo cars should be deemed illegal?
Re: When will this end?
More to the point: A fiber optic or phone switch or a wireless antenna is used to stream pirated content into your home or phone.Lets ban those too, while we’re at it.
Let’s follow the chain:
The app is copyright infringing because it can play illegal video.
The Android device is infringing because it can use software that plays illegal video.
The human is illegal because they *want" to watch things which may be illegal.
The games had it correct: Destroy All Humans!
Can we not simply fill a copyright complaint against Google Chrome? It CAN be used to download illegal stuff, so by their own logic, Google must remove it.
Re:
Following that logic to its endpoint would end with home computers being declared illegal.
Re: Re: Re:
Well all home monitors. When will the monitor companies put proper safeguards in place to prevent the display of copyrighted materials!!
Re: Re: Re:
That is some peoples’ end goal.
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Ah, if this happened when I was a kid…
Re: Re:
Alternatively, they handed out photocopies of the text book instead of buying a brand new book for each student? They must be fined 10 times the entire school’s annual budget to make up for the lost revenue!
Companys will go after apps made by small company,s that might be used to watch illegal stream,s
,they won,t sue microsoft , since microsoft is a major corporation with
dozen,s of lawyers .
under that logic they could sue Sony or other android phone maker,s ,
that that have a video player that plays mp4 and mkv files preinstalled .
we were here before, movie companys sued sony over vcr,s ability to record
movies .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
If not for the invention of silicon they never would have been able to steal our content, so this is why we asking a court to outlaw silicon & allow us to carpet bomb.
This line of thinking needs to be pursued…
If we weren’t making content, people wouldn’t steal it.
So they should go to court suing themselves for creating the problems & allow the rest of us to go on with our lives.
Are they actually attempting to put the cat back in the bag?
The horses have left the barn.
On the audio side:
On the video side:
And now…
Those industries have complained about each and every new technology, but have slowly adapted to each of them… except Internet. They somehow managed to get politicians on their side on this one, thanks to both heavy lobbying and a shared fear of a technology that enables anyone to bypass their exclusive communication channels.
Re: Re:
How did you write all that and fail to note that video killed the radio star?
Re: Re: Re:
had exactly that same thought
Tool author responsible for misuses of his technology
If you write software tool, you have unique position to be able to modify the source code of your software tool. This means that you’re the only one in the world that can fix the tool and get fixed versions distributed in the world.
User communities have all kind of people, including people who do not care about copyrights. If user community manages to misuse your tool, the tool author needs to do corrective actions to prevent the same misuse in the future. This needs to happen before large pirate communities find out about how useful your tool is.
This means that every author of software that is being published in the world, needs to encode copyright rules to his software. If this copyright enforcing "bugfix" manages to break your tool’s main features, then maybe the tool was illegal in the first place. This is what it means for a tool to be copyright infringing.
Note that standardized file formats like .jpg, .mp4, .obj, etc make the piracy problem more likely. While standard file formats are recommended practise, that’s only because we don’t have anything better. They’re still very dangeroius in the copyright area.
Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technology
delete all the fonts for standard letters in your OS and copyright will work better for everyone
Re: Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technology
Are you the author? Maybe might help if you revealed your identity behind anonymous coward -label…
Re: Re: Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technolog
You sure as hell aren’t the author.
Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technology
What, they will not work, unless you can also identify the work, its publication date, and any secondary licenses. Besides which, do you as a programmers want to make yourself liable for copyright infringement because of a bug in your program?
Also, unless the operating system and all software is under external control, any such system can be disabled by a determined programmer, just ask Denuvo.
Re: Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technology
web browsers managed to get it working just fine, even though they’re working on area of software known for its piracy problem, i.e. downloadabe content.
That problem is even worse if you didn’t think of the copyright limitations while writing your code.
again web browsers are doing this properly, even though they still have critical bugs sometimes in their code.
Re: Re: Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technolog
What? They allow content wrapped in DRM to be played, and they do NOT deal with copyright terms. That approach basically tries to make copyright infinitely long, because it tries to control what the user does with content. Also, it is not unknown for distributors to wrap public domain content in DRM, applying restrictions on use that are not part of the law.
Oh by the way, if you think that strict control over copyrighted works will improve your chances of sales, I have this planet that I will sell to you for a small consideration.
Re: Re: Re:2 Tool author responsible for misuses of his techn
The design of the "back" key in browsers ensure that the downloaded content is discarded and you cannot make further copies of it. I.e. browsers do not need copyright’s "distribute" badness bit.
While they still "display" the content.
Re: Re: Re:3 Tool author responsible for misuses of his t
The words look like English, but the meaning does not make sense, as the back key has nothing to do with preventing copying.
Re: Re: Re:4 Tool author responsible for misuses of h
its actually multiple features that togetger do it:
1) back key’s discard operation regularly removes downloaded content
2) browser cache is encoded in such way that its useless for piracy
3) rest of the downloaded content is kept in memory, and not stored in hard disks
Re: Re: Re:5 Tool author responsible for misuses
First of all, anything stored in hard disks is “kept in memory”.
Second, browsers don’t actually work they way you think they do.
Third, if they did, then online piracy wouldn’t be an issue on most sites because the browser would be doing the work of removing copyright-infringing materials.
Fourth, the mechanisms you state don’t prevent piracy; they just aren’t piracy.
Re: Re: Re:6 Tool author responsible for misu
But the services that didn’t bother to do these copy-protection features (like kazaa or napster) have been declared illegal by the courts.
Re: Re: Re:7 Tool author responsible for
Neither does your microwave oven. Should the court declare it illegal?
Re: Re: Re:8 Tool author responsible
The recording industry and hollywood tried to declare vcrs illegal in 1980’s, so why not microwave ovens. The sound that the microwave door makes while closing it, has been patented and anyone else is not allowed to use the same sound.
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
Find the patent, then. Because sounds can’t be patented.
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
"The recording industry and hollywood tried to declare vcrs illegal in 1980′
Yep, and you know what happened? Not only did they fail miserably, once they were forced to accept the VCR’s existence and work along with it instead of against it, they created a whole new industry that for a time dwarfed the industry they were originally trying to "protect" (while still maintaining growth in the original industry).
Not the best example you want to use for what you’re trying to get at.
"The sound that the microwave door makes while closing it, has been patented "
JFC, are you incapable of dealing with reality? There’s at least 2 aspects of that claim that are counter to the real world.
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
Emphasis on “tried”. It didn’t work. At all. You clearly know this. Why would you use that to prove that attempting to make something illegal is a good idea?
There’s a lot wrong with that sentence.
First of all, there is nothing about a sound that is a patentable idea or mechanism. Maybe you could patent a method or mechanism to create a specific sound, but not the sound itself.
Second, I highly doubt that there is a patent involving the sound made by a closing microwave door that is still valid. In addition to being dumb, any such patent would probably have expired by now.
Third, only something “new, useful, and non-obvious” can be patented under U.S. law. While the definition of “useful” in this context is extremely broad, I don’t think it covers the specific sound a microwave door makes when it closes.
Fourth, given the sheer number of different, unaffiliated companies that make and sell microwaves, it would appear that such a patent has not been enforced any time in the past decade or so at the very least.
Fifth, there is a huge difference between copyright and patent. We’ve been talking about copyrights, and the thing with VCRs also involved copyright law. Why are you suddenly talking about patents?
At any rate, without some sort of evidence that such a patent exists and has been granted, I have no reason to believe it exists. Plus, even if it did, that really has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which was about declaring things that lack copy-protection features illegal. Even if microwaves were illegal because they infringe on some patent (highly unlikely at best), that has nothing to do with this thread.
Re: Re: Re:10 Tool author resp
of course it’s a good idea.
Declaring things you see illegal allows you to avoid falling to the traps these illegal products are offering.
When the product is some ripoff of star wars or some other already popular product, you need to be able to regognize these scams and reject their suggestions before they drain your money supply.
This is a responsibility of all users of products. Everyone need to watch for illegal activity and prevent the spead of those practises by voting against them when doing purchasing decisions.
Re: Re: Re:11 Tool author
1) You have not shown that they are illegal.
2) That doesn’t explain why, to support your claim that suing to get microwaves declared illegal is a good idea, you used an example where they failed to get the product declared illegal. I’m not saying that it’s not a good idea (though I’m not saying it is either); I’m just saying that you used a very poor example.
3) As I already said, not all ripoffs are illegal, and most people who buy them are fully aware that they’re ripoffs. I’m not defending all ripoffs here.
4) Declaring a product illegal doesn’t actually make it illegal.
Re: Re: Re:12 Tool aut
On the other hand, if legal proceedings did take a hint from Mr. Meshpage here and all ripoffs were immediately illegal, the porn industry would simply not exist.
I think tp just declared all copyright enforcement on porn illegal!
Re: Re: Re:7 Tool author responsible for
I’m pretty sure those were declared illegal for other reasons. For one thing, the specific mechanisms mentioned wouldn’t even apply to Napster. (I know nothing about Kazaa.) They apply pretty exclusively to web browsers.
And IIRC, things like that were liable only if a) they don’t have substantial noninfringing uses or b) copyright infringement/piracy was explicitly encouraged. Alternatively, failing to remove potentially infringing content after receiving notice could make one liable. Failing to filter out potentially infringing content or making piracy possible is insufficient to be deemed liable.
Re: Re: Re:8 Tool author responsible
only way they can have substantial noninringing uses is via building enough technological protection measures aka copy-protection features. If they fail to do that, 90% of their customers are pirates an thus they fail in the 1st requirement.
Allowing your technology to be used for piracy is the same as encouraging copyright infringement, so if they fail to build copy-protection features, they fail also in the 2nd requirement.
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
That is simply incorrect.
1) Having “substantial uses” does not mean that a substantial number of users don’t use it for infringement. All that matters is whether, when used as intended, it is capable of being used for noninfringing purposes. The question of whether that use is substantial has nothing to do with how it is actually used in practice.
2) The iTunes Store (and many similar digital music stores) doesn’t have copy-protection in the music they sell for download. Nor does GOG for the games they sell.
3) Show me evidence for that figure.
In short, there is absolutely nothing about that requirement that demands built-in copy-protection.
That argument was tried in court, and it failed. Lacking measures to prevent unauthorized copies is not the same as encouraging copyright infringement, even if the makers of the product have general knowledge that infringement occurs. Note how I said that there must be explicit encouragement. What you just said isn’t explicit encouragement. In fact, you fail to explain how “allowing” piracy to occur is equivalent to encouraging infringement.
So no, failing to provide copy-protection doesn’t necessarily violate either of the requirements I gave.
Re: Re: Re:10 Tool author resp
I think you’re missing what copy-protection means. There are many ways to implement copy protection and encoding files with drm is only one of the alternatives.
good copy protection would simply fail to provide the user interface that allows downloading the material and make further copies.
Re: Re: Re:11 Tool author
iTunes absolutely provides “the user interface that allows downloading the material and make further copies”. I’ve used it to burn CDs with downloaded music. (To be clear, this wasn’t piracy. I had paid for the music and wanted back-up CDs.) So by your own definition, iTunes doesn’t provide copy-protection. I can actually use it to bypass copy-protection on prerecorded CDs.
Furthermore, I think you’re mistaken on what copy-protection is. It’s anything that prevents the production of additional copies, not just not providing the tools to do so explicitly in the interface.
Plus, by default, anything on a computer can be copied; you need some sort of additional software to prevent that.
Re: Re: Re:12 Tool aut
Nice thing about copy-protection is that it doesnt need to be absolute guarantee against copying. It is enough that it is difficult enough that large pirate groups and random pirates do not bother to do it.
Basically if your general population has 2% criminals, then it would be bad if more than 2% of your customers are using the service for illegal purposes. I.e. service shouldn’t be targeted to criminal population only, but there should be large (98%) of customers using it for legal ways.
Even simple hints like flooding the pirate population with popups which would make them stop using the service would be enough to fullfill the copy-protection requirements.
Re: Re: Re:13 Tool
Absolutely none of what you said is true except that copy-protection doesn’t need to be 100% effective. But, again, it doesn’t need to be implemented at all.
Maybe you think that’s how copyright law should work, but that’s not how it does work.
And none of your examples of “copy-protection” are possible without DRM. Furthermore, flooding pirates with pop-ups wouldn’t even be copy-protection. You have it backwards: copy-protection is solely the prevention of making copies; DRM is any software-based attempt to prevent or discourage copying or that makes copies made not work properly.
There are some forms of copy-protection that aren’t DRM, but none of them apply to anything available via download or browser (as no physical media is involved).
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Happily, this statement of yours isn’t true. Browsers (as explained earlier) do not use DRM, but they still implement copy protection properly. QED.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
"Browsers (as explained earlier) do not use DRM, but they still implement copy protection properly"
Saying random crap doesn’t make it true.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
As I explained earlier, all of your previous explanations fell under at least one of three categories:
1) Browsers don’t actually do what you claim they do.
2) Even if they do, it’s not copy-protection.
3) If it is copy-protection, and it is implemented in software (which is inherently the case with browsers), then it is DRM by definition.
For the browser stuff, it’s mostly 1 or 2. But basically, I’ve already addressed your explanation several times. Browsers don’t do what you claim, what you claim they do is generally not actually copy-protection but just what makes a browser a browser or is implemented for more practical reasons (e.g. the cache has limited space and doesn’t store data permanently). Furthermore, by definition, any copy-protection implemented in browsers is inherently DRM.
Re: Re: Re:13 Tool
"Nice thing about copy-protection is that it doesnt need to be absolute guarantee against copying. It is enough that it is difficult enough that large pirate groups and random pirates do not bother to do it."
Except, again this thing called the reality causes your silly little ideas to fail.
You see, here in the real world, DRM can be stripped from products once it’s broken (and it’s always broken). Once that happens, no pirate is ever hampered in copying the products on any scale. The only people who are affected are the people who legally purchased the product, and who often need to then pirate what they bought when the DRM provider decides it’s not profitable enough to continue allowing them access to what they bought.
"Even simple hints like flooding the pirate population with popups"
Fortunately, open source software allows us to route around dicks like you who would rather attack paying customers than accept that piracy always has, and always will, happen. Intelligent people build business models to account for this, failed assholes like yourself just sit around and whine that they didn’t get the free money they wanted, and try to make life difficult for everybody else.
Just go out and buy yourself a LEGO set and make a little house with it – it’s the closest you’ll get to anyone building you a mansion.
Re: Re: Re:10 Tool author resp
this is clearly not enough. Substantial non-infringinging purposes means that substantial portition of your user base is using it for legal purposes. When you simply cannot trust your user base to not misuse the features, copy-protection features are essential before you can claim substantial non-infringing purposes.
Note that this doesnt mean that you need to encode every file with DRM. Instead, proper implementation can prevent copying by simply not allowing the operations.
Re: Re: Re:11 Tool author
You may think that that’s what the law should be, but that’s simply not what the law is. Under current law, it’s simply not true that meeting the “substantial noninfringing use” prong of the analysis requires anything about what users actually do with the technology. It’s only about its intended purpose and functionality. How users choose to use it is immaterial.
You may think that that shouldn’t be legal, but it absolutely is. The users may be doing something illegal with it, but under the law, the creator of the technology is not liable for that if they don’t take active steps to encourage illegal behavior and there are any plausible, substantial noninfringing uses for the technology.
And for the record, the “substantial” part of that prong is a pretty low bar.
You can’t “prevent copying by simply not allowing the operations” without DRM or something similar. At least not on a Windows machine. Anything that disallows the ability to copy software is DRM.
Re: Re: Re:12 Tool aut
this isnt true, and my previous web browser example is showing how to do it without DRM.
Re: Re: Re:13 Tool
Again, your browser isn’t preventing copying at all. It just doesn’t directly do anything that makes anything more than transitory copies. That’s not copy-protection. That’s just how browsers work. You didn’t even try to refute my counterargument back then.
Re: Re: Re:14 Re:
Browser is downloading large amount of content from the network. Usually you need scraping software or a web browser to access all the content — parsing the html file is necessary step before you can find all urls that are being downloaded while browser displays a web page.
This scraping software has been declared illegal in the SciTech cases, because it bypasses technical protection measures.
Note that browsers are still allowed, even though it fundamentally does the same operation than your average scraping software. The difference is that browser actually implements the copy-protection feature and do not allow further copies of the content. Web site scraping software do not have those copy-protections implemented, making the software illegal.
Basically, in software development side, a script that parses html file and downloads all the urls that are available in the file is trivial to implement with current technology if you have software developers available. But legally those operations are dubious, if copy-protection is not implemented.
Note that browsers allow downloading some of the files and saving them to hard disk. This download operation is allowed, only because it requires manual steps to execute the operation, and thus it’s impossible to use it to download large amount of content. Any attempts to automate or script the browser download operation, might run into legal problems.
basically, download operation together with large amount of content is usually considered illlegal. It needs special tricks (like whatever linux distributions are doing with licensing) before courts accept that large downloads are legal.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
Browsers… do not inherently have any copy protection. At all.
You can scream at the sky all you want. It’s still not fact.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
It’s amazing how little someone who apparently built his own website understand about the way the internet works.
Re: Re: Re:15 Re:
Not one bit of what you just said is true.
That’s not how browsers work; that’s not how scraping software works; that’s not why some scraping software is illegal; that’s not how Linux distribution works; that’s not how copyright law works.
There’s a lot of technobabble and legalese there, but they don’t actually have any basis in fact or law.
Re: Re: Re:16 Re:
Tell me then, how do you make further copies of the content that browser downloads? Since my description wasn’t accurate, you need to have a way to use browser in such way that you can make another copy of your average web page, using just the features of a browser.
When you attempt it, one of the following happens:
1) you cannot make full copy of web site
or 2) you need tons of manual steps for downloading it at one file at the time
or 3) you are using something else than a browser
You need to figure out what other alternatives there is, since all those possible alternatives in this task indicate that copy-protection is available inside browsers.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
Uh, no.
I’m not going to go into all the details, because you’ve given me such an easy out.
Ergo, the mechanism you’re referring to isn’t copy-protection; it’s just part of what makes a browser a browser. Copy-protection has to go beyond simply not making copies on its own, and it has to be something beyond what makes it a browser (or video tape or video game or whatever).
Also, there’s this:
And guess what? Some browsers allow you to download a web site one file at a time. You don’t need to go outside what the browser allows to do so. I fail to see how that is in any way copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
when pirates copies the products, you ended up with damage which the pirate itself could not fix (by removing all the copies). This is because pirate itself didn’t control the publication of the product, but instead there were copies outside of pirate’s control.
Browser is completely different. If pirate publishes some content to the world, and when he gets DCMA notice, it’s possible for him to remove the content from the web by simply deleting the file from the web server. This feature was never available when pirates copied the products in the old-fashioned way. Controlling the pirate source did nothing to fix the infringement.
So browsers with their copy-protection are actually improving the situation, and puts the control of the publications back to pirate’s hands. DCMA notices are effective, because it’s possible to remove the pirate source from the world.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
"when pirates copies the products, you ended up with damage"
No, you didn’t.
"If pirate publishes some content to the world, and when he gets DCMA notice, it’s possible for him to remove the content from the web by simply deleting the file from the web server"
That has nothing to do with a browser, you raging idiot.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
Instead of cloning all the web pages, users are cloning just the browser binary to get further copies of the web page’s content. This way actual content is removable.
Of course this has everything to do with how browser works.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
You seem amazingly confused about what clients and servers actually do.
Re: Re: Re:22 Re:
You’re the one who claimed that browsers have no copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
Because they don’t. You have yet to describe anything that browsers do that is copy-protection. Not only that, what you described has nothing to do with the browse itself.
What you’ve described is, at most, just how client-server communication works. It has nothing to do with copy-protection. Again, something that is a fundamental aspect of making a product work at all is not copy-protection unless the product is itself copy-protection.
Not that you’ve accurately described what actually happens, but even under its own terms, it couldn’t possibly be copy-protection. It’s not preventing people from making copies of anything that was online at the moment the website was loaded. It’s a fundamental part of how client-server communications work rather than an added feature.
Not only that, but allowing users “to get further copies of the web site’s content” does not stop unauthorized copying. It’s the removal of copies from the servers that prevents additional unauthorized copying. That’s not something that the browser itself is doing; that’s a voluntary action by someone with the ability to remove content from the server.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
Because I a) understand what browsers do and b) understand what copy protection is.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
That has nothing to do with browsers. That’s just how computers and the internet work. Not only is that not copy-protection (it doesn’t prevent copies from being made, only removes copies already made), it’s not anything implemented by the browser.
Also, that actually doesn’t change much. If a pirate uploads an unauthorized copy to the internet, other people can download it, creating their own copies. Even if the pirate takes down the copy they uploaded, others will still have copies that they can upload.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
Computers and internet does not work like that by accident. Someone needs to design the systems. And those systems were designed while copyright laws were enforced, so the authors need to build protections against copyright infringements. These protections are called copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
I am impressed that you never get tired of spouting garbage
Computers and internet does not work like that by accident.
almost all modern computers are turing complete which means every computer can run every program that one of them can run if the computer has enough time and if doesn’t break first
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
"Someone needs to design the systems."
People with far greater insight into reality than you.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
No. That is simply not true. When the internet and computers were invented, the idea of copyright wasn’t at issue; they were originally developed with the military in mind, where copyright is almost never an issue at all. And later, it was used for businesses, and rarely for anything copyrightable.
Even if it was, you’re missing the crucial point I was making: that still has nothing to do with the browser. It’s just how computers and the internet work in general. Accessing the internet without a browser is no different with respect to your claims. Thus, even if that claim was 100% true, it would not be evidence that browsers have copy-protection. At best, it would be evidence that computers and the internet have copy-protection.
Furthermore, copy-protection means adding nonessential features that protect from attempts to copy that would otherwise be possible with the technology. What you’ve described thus far (not just now but earlier in the thread) solely consists of things that simply aren’t actually involved with the technology at all, are based on efforts by the pirate to remove content or other methods to remove existing copies, or are essential components to making the technology function at all with reasons for implementation completely unrelated to copyright law. None of that is copy-protection.
To the extent those “features” you mention both exist and actually prevent copies being made, those effects are, in fact, just coincidentally protecting copyrighted works. That was not the intent guiding the design. If you want to convince me otherwise, cite some evidence that the authors were considering copyright law when these things were created.
None of what you said browsers have as copy-protection is actually copy-protection, and a lot of it has nothing to do with the browsers themselves.
And again, nothing in copyright law requires copy-protection to be implemented. Please point to exact clauses from U.S. laws or quotes from court rulings to prove me wrong, along with links to those statutes and opinions so I can verify. Then explain how they support your position.
Re: Re: Re:22 Re:
This isn’t true. The US copyright law explicitly does the following:
1) it makes copyright infringement illegal
2) that illegal action has explicit damage awards at around $703 upto $30,000 per infringed work and might be increased to $150,000 per work if its found to be willful.
3) The criteria for finding copyright infrigement explicitly reads:
a) plaintiff is the author of the work / owns the copyright
b) defendant copied the work
4) There exists several classes of copyright inringement:
a) direct infringement
b) contributory infringement
5) to find contributory infringement requires:
a) knowledge of direct infringement
b) materially contributing to that infringement
6) This 5b section is fullfilled when
a) "merely providing facilities or the site for an infringement might amount to material contribution" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infringement)
This 6a means that all the tools (as required by the current techdirt article) need to implement copy-protection (of all the content that passes through the tool). QED.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
Oh, and further there is another form of secondary infringement called vicarious infringement:
6a) defendant had right to control the infringing activity
6b) defendant derived a financial or commercial benefit from the infringement.
This also requires all authors of tools to implement copy-protection because 6a is essential property of how tools are working.
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
So, again, what the fuck does that have to do with browsers?
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
I asked him to provide citations for the proposition that copy-protection is legally mandated.
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
That’s simply not true. Many tools do not give the creator any control over how the tool gets used.
For example, the only copy-protection that copy machines have is for U.S. currency (which is mandated by a different statute). Yet people don’t sue copy-machine manufacturers for vicarious infringement because they don’t have any actual control over how the machine gets used.
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Software is not among those tools which funamentally lack this control. Instead it depends on software developers expertise how good control the software can have against copyright infringement. Basically only small children are not able to build these controls, given that the if statement requiring users to follow copyright is just one line of code. But many software developers are against the law when they fail to build these copy-protections.
Several different techniques can be done to control user’s copyright infringements:
a) limit the ability to extract perfect digital copies from the software
b) control how copyright infringed material can be encoded to software’s data structures
c) limit the amount of material that can be used (file count, file byte size limits)
d) limit the complexity of the content handled
e) license and permission checking
f) end user identification
g) controlling DISPLAY, PERFORM, DISTRIBUTE -copyright bits
h) DRM systems and accurate usage counts
i) etc…
Software developers have a whole space of techniques available to control user’s copyright infringements. If they choose not to employ these techniques, the software developes are liable for amy damage that happens.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
First of all, not all of that is copy-protection. Specifically, b, c, d, and f aren’t actually copy-protection in and of themselves. Some may form a part of or facilitate copy-protection, but on their own are not copy-protection without more. For example, end-user-verification might not serve any copy-protection purpose whatsoever but rather privacy protection, identification by other users, or to enforce bans or user-based restrictions.
Second, for the record, to the extent it is copy-protection, as applied to software, it’s DRM, which kinda makes h redundant.
Third, g is basically just the end result of copyright enforcement; it’s not a mechanism.
Fourth, not all software actually implements any of the things on your list or anything similar. For example, the OS for Commodore 64s don’t have any of those things. Windows 10 does have some level of user-verification, but only for privacy protection. The OS doesn’t have any built-in copy-protection. (Well, other than protecting itself, perhaps, but even that doesn’t apply to Linux.) Has Microsoft, Commodore, or Red Hat ever been held liable for copyright infringement that uses their OSs?
Fifth, there are ways to implement some of that in copy machines. They already do it for U.S. currency. By your logic, therefore, they do exercise some level of control over copies on their machines. So why aren’t they liable?
You’re stretching what is meant by “control” with respect to contributory or vicarious infringement. What it’s referring to is what can legally and feasibly be done by the maker(s) once a specific instance of infringement is specifically known to have occurred using their system(s) to stop that specific infringement solely from locations they own and systems they directly control (i.e. without either remotely hacking the user’s computer or going to the user’s house or place of business and directly accessing their computer).
And again, that’s not copy-protection because it occurs after the infringement has already occurred. Copy-protection is solely what’s done beforehand to prevent copyright infringement or copying generally, not to remedy a specific existing instance of infringement. And as a reminder, they must be implemented for the specific purpose of preventing copying, not as an essential part of making the product work.
Finally, what is this “one line of code” that magically protects copyright and that software developers are supposedly required by law to include? I have certainly never heard of such a thing, and I am a college senior majoring in Computer Science & Engineering. We had to study extensively on the implications and requirements of copyright law as applied to software.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Actions are needed both before and after infringement.
Basically software programming languages have the following tools:
1) type checking
2) unit testing
When used together, those techniques ensure that failures are not happening in software.
These same techniques can be used for copyright checks:
1) limits are placed before infringement occurs
2) manual testing is done after deployment of software to ensure efficiency of the built-in limits
Expert software developers know how to use these tools.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
The law only requires action after infringement has occurred. And by definition, that isn’t copy-protection. Ergo, copy-protection isn’t required by law.
You haven’t shown that the law requires infringement checks before the fact. You have only cited law that may require measures to be taken after infringement has already occurred. (The knowledge requirement means that the makers are only liable for failing to take action after receiving information of a specific instance of infringement to remedy that particular instance.)
Again, whether or not the technology exists (theoretically or in reality) to prevent copyright infringement is immaterial. The question is whether such measures are legally mandated. (Also, whether or not browsers implement such measures.) Sure, such technology exists; in software, it’s either in the form of DRM or filters (and no, filters aren’t copy-protection, either). However, not all software implement such measures, and not doing so doesn’t, in itself, make the devs/publisher liable for any copyright infringement by users on or using their software or platform. You have not proven otherwise.
None of what you just said actually addresses any of the points I just raised: copy-protection is only measures taken before infringement, not after; the only measures mandated by law are those to be taken after infringement; many pieces of software don’t implement copy-protection or any other form of infringement prevention, yet they aren’t found liable for infringement; many of the specific measures you name aren’t, in fact, copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
This definitely is not true. The whole concept of "liability" exists so that users can sue the companies who built the products that failed while end users tried to use them.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
When it comes to product liability, that is correct. When it comes to liability for copyright infringement done by third parties using the product or service, on the other hand, that is not the case, and you provide no sources for such a proposition.
The language you previously cited from copyright law doesn’t include liability for failure to prevent copy infringement under any circumstances. It only makes the company liable for user infringement if the company knew about that specific infringement and failed to remedy the situation to the extent that they are able to, if the company takes active steps encouraging infringement, or if the product/service has no non-infringing uses. (And, of course, if the company itself directly and actively infringed on the copyright, then they are liable.)
Nothing in the law demands that companies take any measures whatsoever to prevent copyright infringement beforehand, nor does it make companies liable for copyright infringement by users based solely on the fact that they failed to implement preventative measures in their product/service against users’ infringement beforehand.
I invite you to cite the specific law, statute, or case—complete with quotes for the specific language—that supports your interpretation or refutes mine. As I stated before, you have not yet done so.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Well, when I was building my software, I had one user trying the limits of my copyright checks. Their approach was to take a copyrighted image, and encode it using different coloured cubes in my software, resulting in (poor) copy of someone elses copyrighted work. To make this form of copyright infringement work, they needed to build a large script that took a pixel from copyrighted image, and turn those pixels to cube 3d objects. Their argument is that I can never protect against this kind of copyright infringement.
Well, the solution was easy. Limit the size of the script file allowed the procedure to fail if more than 100 pixels are being read from such copyrighted work. All the other use cases seemed to work with small 200 line scripts, but their copyright infringement test case required 30000 lines of script. So limiting the script size to 1000 lines using single if-statement fixed the infringement opportunity.
Software developers need to develop this kind of small fixes to get proper solution for copyrights.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
"Well, when I was building my software, I had one user trying the limits of my copyright checks"
So, it was extremely poorly tested? Makes sense.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
"took a pixel from copyrighted image"
Oh, and again I wonder what sort of coder you actually are. Any real coder would know that the term "pixel" refers to an element that’s created to display a value between 0 and 255 on each of the RGB colours. By definition ANY pixel you create is from a previous copyrighted work, because there’s only around 16 million possible combinations, and all of them appeared in photography and cinema before you were born.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
This “solution” doesn’t work for every scenario. Many pieces of software don’t involve images of any sort; many others, by necessity, need to check every pixel of an image (e.g. optical character recognition software). Additionally, many pieces of software are simply unable to add such restrictions to files at all because they have no control over user-made procedures.
Your solution also doesn’t allow any exceptions for “fair use”, “de minimis” use, public domain materials, properly licensed use, or even the author’s use. And that’s the fundamental problem here: it’s impossible to prevent even a sizable amount of infringing uses without blocking a large amount of non-infringing uses. A single line of code is simply insufficient.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
Products are not required to implement all the use cases that law allows. If you can design a crowbar that prevents its use in burglary, then that implementation is clearly better, even if it might prevent some legal uses of crowbars too. The only reason this kind of crowbars are not yet in the market is that the feature makes crowbars too expensive. But product vendors should do everything they can, to ensure that their products are safe to use. This includes copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
Copy-protection is far more analogous to the anti-burglary crowbar than to safety measures.
None of what you said proves that copy-protection is legally necessary. More to the point, I noted that your solution prevents so many non-infringing uses—including those by the original author or current copyright owner—that it’s simply unfeasible in most products. In fact, it could potentially ban most legitimate use cases. It’s far too restrictive to justify using it in most scenarios. It may work for your case, but it’s not workable in most cases.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
"But many software developers are against the law when they fail to build these copy-protections."
You can tell yourself that all you want, it doesn’t make it true.
In fact, your idiotic fantasy is the direct opposite of reality – for example, the DMCA says that you cannot distribute a tool to break DRM if it’s applied to a file. It does not say that you cannot distribute an unprotected file. If your stupid version of reality was true, iTunes and Amazon Music would be illegal because you can buh unprotected MP3 files. Fortunately, the only inhabitant of your reality is you.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Here’s a real question. If it is possible that my reality is the truth, why would companies take the risk? My solution (of not doing copyright infringement) works in both realities. If it originally wasn’t illegal, then my solution of avoiding copyright infringement is still working — there simply isn’t good reason to take the risk that your reality was wrong and you’d need to pay 300k damages. On the other hand, if it was illegal, you could be facing lawsuit and tons of damages and lawyer’s fees.
It’s better to avoid the risk completely and consider all possible ways how you could turn into illegal area, and avoid those risks.
Being too careful isn’t dangerous, but taking unnecessary risks can ruin your whole company.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
"Here’s a real question. If it is possible that my reality is the truth, why would companies take the risk?"
It’s not possible that the reality you invented is the truth, it differs wildly from the way things actually work.
"It’s better to avoid the risk completely and consider all possible ways how you could turn into illegal area, and avoid those risks."
By the definitions you seem to be applying, everything is potentially illegal in the manner you suggest and n o company can operate. Not even companies that don’t deal with potentially infringing products – even basic office equipment like the printer or photocopier is risky by your standards.
Thankfully, your ideas don;’t apply to anybody else, and the rules the rest of us live by allow these things to exist, even if it’s undeniable that they have been used to infringe at some point.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
Well, since we’ve repeated noted that that’s not possible. Again, in your reality, copy machines and OSs would not provide the proper measures to prevent the companies from being held liable for infringement being done by users using their products.
In other words, if “your reality” is the truth, why are so many companies clearly taking that risk?
No, because it restricts way too many noninfringing uses, and places way too much burden on the makers of the software for how users choose to use it.
Being too careful can cost more money and time that could be spent improving the core product rather than worrying about running afoul of someone’s interpretation of the law divorced from fact and logic. Again, there are many clearly noninfringing uses that are restricted by copy-protection, so to say the risks are unnecessary isn’t actually true. And like I said, your interpretation of copyright law is simply flat-out wrong. Reality is not a matter of opinion. This particular issue is well-settled.
I could imagine a reality where backing-up my computer would infringe on copyright. However, I’m willing to take that “risk” because I know that that simply isn’t the law.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
You just snuck in that bit about copy-protection without any justification. For one thing, even if 6a (and thus 5b) is fulfilled, you must also fulfill 5a, which requires specific knowledge of the specific infringement occurring. General knowledge of infringement is insufficient to fulfill 5a.
Re: Re: Re:17 Re:
So, what you’re saying is that you’re too dumb to understand dynamically generated server-side content, and because you can’t scrape them the way you would a static site you assume it’s some kind of copy protection on the client side?
"Tell me then, how do you make further copies of the content that browser downloads?"
Right click, save as..? Copy the cache folder? Go to the version that archive.org has saved, since that was done by people who understand how things actually work?
Re: Re: Re:18 Re:
This one had manual steps…
This cache was already mentioned to be encoded…
This was not using a browser…
Your examples are still proving that copy-protection is enabled.
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
"This one had manual steps.."
So… you’re saying that the feature not only has to be built into the browser, but has to automatically happen with less than 2 clicks? Are those goalposts heavy?
"This cache was already mentioned to be encoded…"
Yet, the people who make the browsers also include tools to decompress them, and the reason for them being compressed to begin with is due to disk space & efficiency, not copy protection.
"This was not using a browser…"
I use a browser to go to archive.org. Your idiotic rules keep changing for some reason.
But, I do notice that you ignored the simple fact that modern web pages are usually dynamically generated, meaning that there is no way to scrape all of them since they don’t exist till you call them in your browser. Funny that.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
well, if you’re building your pirate collection, all kinds of manual steps are breaking your abililty to copy the copyrighted works.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
That doesn’t make it copy-protection. It can take me more effort to find a certain bookmark than to copy something copyrighted on the internet.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
"all kinds of manual steps are breaking your abililty to copy the copyrighted works."
Most pirates aren ‘t lazy sacks of shit like you, and can handle clicking twice when they want to do something. For someone who hasn’t bothered to design an interface, you sure are picky about how other people design them.
Just admit you were either lying or delusional, and accept you were wrong. Again.
Re: Re: Re:22 Re:
Where do you get your information from? This seems to be incorrect piece of information.
Re: Re: Re:23 Re:
I believe he got it from trying your program. It was firsthand information.
What I found interesting is that you said that seems incorrect. Well, it’s your program. Why don’t you know for sure?
Re: Re: Re:24 Re:
"I believe he got it from trying your program. It was firsthand information"
No, because he only makes it available on Windows and I don’t use that OS any more, I’m just going on what other people on these threads have indicated. Also, the fact that there’s no screenshots of the program in operation would support the idea that there’s nothing to take screenshots of in the first place.
I’m happy to be proven wrong if I’m mistaken, but I haven’t seen any reason to install Windows to see for myself. This nonsense is entertaining but not that entertaining.
Re: Re: Re:25 Re:
Try this one:
https://tpgames.org/builder_mini.png
but the tool download page pretty much indicates the same stuff.
Re: Re: Re:26 Re:
OK, I stand corrected, thank you. Although, it’s still no mystery why you’re having problems finding a userbase.
Re: Re: Re:27 Re:
Yeah, must be because I refuse to spam people with adverticements.
Even the bus ads might be too invasive, given that people should type url to their phone and then watch their poor phone die on heavy web page content.
Re: Re: Re:28 Re:
"Yeah, must be because I refuse to spam people with adverticements"
Nah, it’s because nobody who’d be remotely interested in using it knows what the hell it’s supposed to do, except when pushed you mention it does something similar to way more popular and established products.
It really doesn’t matter how much your spammed people, you don’t appear to be offering a product anybody wants – and by the look of your UI in that screenshot, nobody would want to even attempt to learn. But, bravo on calling our Blender’s UI when your own software looks like that, it must take some courage.
"Even the bus ads might be too invasive, given that people should type url to their phone"
Ooooh…. the self awareness is close now… You’re right that was a dumb thing to ask people to do, but having to type in a URL is a far third compared to your lack of any kind of targeting and your refusal to include any information about what the product was in your ads. The problem wasn’t asking people to go to your website, the problem is that you gave them no reason to even consider it.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
All the "popular" products seem to put you to a mailing list and keep spamming adverticements every 2 weeks.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
"All the "popular" products seem to put you to a mailing list and keep spamming adverticements every 2 weeks."
Where’s the requirement for an email address here?
https://www.blender.org/download/
…and you again you display an astounding ignorance of the way the internet works. If you’re that opposed to being on a mailing list, why are you a) giving them an email to begin with and b) giving them your real one? Anyone with the barest knowledge of these things at least has a burner account to send such things to.
Re: Re: Re:31 Re:
When a web page asks for your email address, it’s legal requirement to provide a correct email address. Using other people’s email addresses or some fake email address (which you do not read) is illegal operation.
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
no it’s not
a fake email address is just a contract counter offer
Re: Re: Re:33 Re:
Web site owners need to be able to rely that the information provided by the users are valid information. When web page asks for information like email address, there is usually some legal reason for the question, like it needs to be able to identify the end users and able to contact the users if there is problemss with the services provided.
Sadly these legal requirements are regularly misused for adverticement purposes.This means that end users are reluctant giving correct information to web sites in fear of getting adverticement spam which they cannot stop. Still the legal requirement to give correct information exists, because the legal framework relies on accuracy of the information provided by the users.
Re: Re: Re:34 Re:
Actually, no it isn’t. There is no such legal requirement. The only legal requirement involved is on the owner, not the user. And at any rate, how could they enforce such a thing to begin with if you provide no other identifying information?
Re: Re: Re:32 Re:
"When a web page asks for your email address, it’s legal requirement to provide a correct email address."
No, it’s not. Unless you have some particularly silly laws where you live, you’re again inventing things to try and be right about something. You’ve not, and you are in fact addressing a fictional reality that nobody else lives in.
But, I do notice you ignored the part where I pointed out that most competitors to your crapfest don’t ask for the email to begin with. Meaning that even if you weren’t bullshitting about the email requirement, you’re still wrong about your spam claim.
Re: Re: Re:29 Re:
well, the learning curve has been properly designed in the tool. There’s only small number of UI tricks that you need to learn, and those have been designed to be identical to how all the other software works, including right-click menus and left-click move or connect actions.
Re: Re: Re:30 Re:
"well, the learning curve has been properly designed in the tool"
It doesn’t matter if nobody wants to learn it. Why should people do that? What unique property does your software have that’s not replicated in other software that’s far nicer to use?
Re: Re: Re:19 Re:
Those “manual steps” are built-in to the interface, and the cache is only encoded to reduce space.
Copy-protection has to actively prevent copying that would otherwise be relatively simple to do, and it has to be intended for that purpose. Copy-protection is not simply failing to include a ready option for copying not otherwise available.
But fine. Here’s one: print. Just a single button on many browsers, or a menu option in others. It will print out a copy of whatever the browser has loaded at that moment. Instant copy.
Re: Re: Re:20 Re:
hah, that’s hilarious. So to share this copy with your fellow pirates, you would print it to paper first, then start faxing it to your friends, and include instructions to send it to 10 of your friends to receive tons of other pages in return mail?
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
"your fellow pirates"
I love the fact that your argument has failed so miserably that you now have to resort to lying about the people showing you how much of an idiot you are.
Re: Re: Re:21 Re:
Or you could, I dunno, print and then scan. Alternatively, several programs are treated as a destination printer without actually creating a paper copy.
At any rate, you still haven’t addressed my main argument about copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:10 Tool author resp
this is only true whenever DCMA applies. Many of the products where this problem occurs, cannot use DCMA’s protections, because they do not follow the requirements that the law places for entities that want to benefit from the DCMA.
Re: Re: Re:11 Tool author
We’re talking about copyright law as applied to internet service providers. That’s emphatically the domain of the DMCA.
Re: Re: Re:12 Tool aut
Also, what I said regarding legal liability also applies to physical products like the VCR and predates the DMCA. So actually, it’s not only true whenever DMCA applies. That’s part of copyright law as a whole.
Re: Re: Re:8 Tool author responsible
Copy-protection features can be implemented in multiple ways, but where both napster and kazaa fails (and thus was declared illegal) was that they maintained large collection of copyrighted content and offered it to customers, but their content collection was full of pirated material, i.e. they didn’t have a license to publish the material that was included in their catalog.
Even a single pirated work in a content collection can make the whole collection illegal.
The legal alternatives all have ways of avoiding this unwanted outcome to happen.
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
I think you’re misunderstanding the Napster case. (Again, I’m unfamiliar with Kazaa.) At any rate, even under your description, that wasn’t a problem with copy-protection. That is another issue entirely.
I’m pretty certain that Napster wasn’t declared illegal for merely lacking copy-protection features. I believe the issue was that the owners were explicitly encouraging infringement. It had nothing to do with a lack of copy-protection.
Re: Re: Re:10 Tool author resp
lack of copy-protection features is at the center of RIAA/MPAA’s "making available" legal splatter.
Basically, if copy-protection features are properly implemented, it becomes impossible or rare that the service contains pirated content. Rest of the problems can be manually handled.
Note that manually filtering out illegal content is allowed. If your service have problems with the user population related to pirated content, it’s always possible to manually go through all the content and either obtain necessary licenses or remove the content from the service.
Re: Re: Re:11 Tool author
Your ideas simply don’t conform with the law or reality.
Re: Re: Re:6 Tool author responsible for misu
"Second, browsers don’t actually work they way you think they do."
Most things don’t, to be fair…
Re: Re: Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technolog
"web browsers managed to get it working just fine"
So you admit you use open source software, and even approve of if, interesting…
Re: Re: Re:2 Tool author responsible for misuses of his techn
huh, as a software developer, I’m actually author of some open source/free software…. But guess that piece of information blows your mind…
Re: Re: Re:3 Tool author responsible for misuses of his t
Not really. Compared to most trolls you actually link to what you contribute and develop, which makes you better… and then you choose to fuck it up by insisting that you deserve a government-mandated mansion for your work. That’s not mind-blowing.
Re: Re: Re:4 Tool author responsible for misuses of h
That’s part o the cunning plan to get techdirt’s users to try how to create mansions with my tools….
Re: Re: Re:5 Tool author responsible for misuses
Which you won’t give anyone, so… yeah, in addition to your inability to convince anyone, it’s a shit plan.
Re: Re: Re:6 Tool author responsible for misu
what you mean by this, the tools are available for download in the web page…
I never claimed that I can convince people to do anything.
Re: Re: Re:7 Tool author responsible for
Therefore, a shit plan.
What’s next? You planning to vomit over 300 useless comments on this thread like the last one?
Re: Re: Re:8 Tool author responsible
if it helps, why not?
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
It doesn’t. It only makes you look like a barely legible idiot with a slight grasp on reality, and you hardly need further help making people reach that conclusion based on your previous posts.
Re: Re: Re:9 Tool author responsi
I’d just like to point out that, by definition, a “useless comment” doesn’t help. That’s why it’s useless.
Re: Re: Re:7 Tool author responsible for
What web page? I haven’t seen it here.
I mean, isn’t that the problem? You’re just proving the AC’s point. If you can’t convince people to do something, why are you expecting them to do anything?
Re: Re: Re:3 Tool author responsible for misuses of his t
" I’m actually author of some open source/free software"
Given how rabidly you attack the very concept of open source in threads here, that’s moderately interesting, but not surprising. Your logical consistency in your arguments is often secondary only to your grasp on reality in many conversations.
Re: Re: Re:3 Tool author responsible for misuses of his t
That’s the first time I’m hearing this. It begs so many questions. Why, then, do you always attack open-source/free software? Why do you always seem perplexed as to how or why it works, or sometimes even what it is? Given that you’ve said that it doesn’t ever work, why would you yourself use it?
Re: Re: Re:4 Tool author responsible for misuses of h
open source is stable enough that they can take the beating. Noone anyway cares what people in trolling-blogs/websites are says. Yellow press has always tried to make a scandal out of things which are generally accepted to be true. And it’s a good test case whether your bs is actually working or not.
Re: Re: Re:5 Tool author responsible for misuses
Are you calling yourself a troll? I mean, maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but it sounds like you attack open-source because “it can take the beating” rather than any actual merit or genuine belief behind your attacks.
Re: Re: Re:6 Tool author responsible for misu
No, it should be "master troll", not just ordinary cave troll.
Re: Re: Re:7 Tool author responsible for
A master cave troll is still a cave troll.
Re: Tool author responsible for misuses of his technology
[Asserts facts not in evidence]
(As always)
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